


prudent nocturnal creatures

by pvwork



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Twilight Fusion, Crack Treated Seriously, Humor, M/M, Nature, Team Jacob, Vampires, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 23:59:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15874380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvwork/pseuds/pvwork
Summary: About three things Shiro was absolutely positive. First, Lotor was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him- and Shiro didn’t know how potent that part might be- that thirsted for blood. And third, Shiro was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with Keith, his friendly neighborhood werewolf.





	prudent nocturnal creatures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karples/gifts).



**1.**

Lotor’s car was a two seater with an engine that purred like a cat, low and sweet. Shiro looked out the passenger side window to peer into the dark green forest below that flowed past like a river of emerald jewels reflecting the gray-white light of the overcast morning.

“This is nice,” he said.

It was nothing like Phoenix, which he missed on occasion, but it was nice.

Grinning, Lotor gunned the engine and took the next turn even faster. He steered with steady hands. It was hard to believe he was only in his twenties when he drove like he’d been handling cars since cars were invented.

“I want to take you somewhere special,” Lotor said. “You don’t get out enough, and the Pacific Northwest is full of hidden wonders.”

Shiro had been around Forks. The roads were narrow and downtown wasn’t very lively, but for a man who grew up in Phoenix, it carried by way of its location, a certain kind of surrealist appeal. He found magic in the way the trees grew, in the way vines wrapped around walls and hung onto trees, because the place itself was so wet and lush and so viscerally, vibrantly green.

Seattle felt like a city, smelled like a city, and the restaurant they entered to could only exist in a city.

It was so nice that Shiro had to wonder how a man who seemingly didn’t work at all managed to afford it. There were no prices on the menu! For a newly minted high school teacher like Shiro, this whole trip to was a real treat.

“Order whatever you want,” Lotor all but purred.

So Shiro ordered roasted prawns and filet mignon and a lava cake for desert. Lotor ordered red wine and sipped it slowly as he watched Shiro eat.

When Shiro went to fill up his empty wine glass, Lotor stayed his hand with a finger on his wrist and lifted his own glass to Shiro’s lips. “Take a sip, babe.”

So Shiro did.

He was no oenophile, but he thought that the wine was exceptionally smooth although the notes of oak and fruit were lost on him.

Lotor was a gracious dinner companion even though he didn’t eat a thing.

“Thanks for taking me out tonight,” Shiro said once Lotor had pulled into his driveway. “It was a friendly thing to do for the new guy in town.”

“It was a pleasure,” Lotor replied. “I love to watch you...dine.”

“O-kay. That’s cool. See you around, man.”

**2.**

Shiro first saw him on a weekend run. It had been a beautiful Sunday, sunshine streaming through a canopy of leaves to dapple the forest floor with patches of light as delicately interlaced as an heirloom doily. The man had appeared so suddenly. He had been all wild hair and lithe strength and, most memorably, completely naked.

He hadn’t immediately turned to flash Shiro, so he probably hadn’t meant to be seen by anyone. It was only at Shiro’s sharp intake of breath that he had reacted at all, although how that was possible when Shiro was so far away remained to be explained, and he had simply tensed his shoulders and gone further into the forest. His loping gait, the easy way he covered ground through the difficult to traverse undergrowth led Shiro to believe that he had spotted nothing more than a ghost.

The second time Shiro saw him, the man was sitting on a cliff. He was only wearing cut off jean shorts and nothing else. The jorts were wet and slung low on his hips as he lay in the weak afternoon sun.

Shiro had two options. He could keep on running and never find out the truth, or he could—

His feet had already made up their mind. Shiro was running towards Birthday Suit faster than his mind could process the right way to start things.

“Hi,” Shiro said. “I’m Takashi Shirogane, uh, the new History teacher at Forks High. The kids call me Mr. Shiro.”

“I know you.”

“Great, we’re halfway there. Who are you?”

“Keith.”

“Keith?”

“Keith Kogane.”

“So I think I may have seen you the other day,” Shiro tried.

“Do you want to learn how to cliff dive?” Keith asked.

Which was how Shiro ended up stripping down to his skivvies on a deserted public beach on a sleepy Saturday afternoon and staring at an incredibly fit man dive feet first off of a cliff in front of him.

Keith took a running start, and his loping gait was the same as it ever was, familiar to Shiro now after the third time he had watched Keith launch himself over the edge of the cliff.

When Shiro made his first jump, it was like falling in love for the first time all over again. Adrenaline ran through all his blood vessels like liquid nitrogen, turbo charging his heart, and making his vision narrow to just the churning gray waves below that were approaching so incredibly fast. It was exhilarating and terrifying, and when the water finally broke beneath him it had hurt, but it hadn’t hurt so much that he wasn’t willing to do it again. The sensation of falling was so addictive. The anticipation of it, the sheer joy of jumping off that cliff and the reckless pleasure of calculated risk was exactly like falling in love.

Keith swam over to Shiro once Shiro finally surfaced and grinned. “Did you like it? Do you want to go again?”

“God,” Shiro sputtered in the cold, cold Pacific. “Yes.”

**3.**

Shiro had led a pretty unremarkable life up until now, if you discounted all the incredible things that happened along the way to bring him to Forks.

He had enlisted when he was a much younger man, been drownproofed and then shipped around the world, done unspeakable things for the sake of his brothers-in-arms, and lost an arm on the way, so when he said that the situation was all fucked up, he really meant it. Plus, he taught at the highschool level. His bullshit meter was primed for high level fuckery, but whatever was happening was beyond even his extremely high tolerance.

To date, strange things that have happened include: men wandering around the forest naked; independently wealthy men hanging around the school parking lot crushing cars with their bare hands to keep Shiro safe, and young women with white hair warning him of supernatural entities out for his blood.

It was hard to know what to make of it all.

**4.**

Keith delivered a package of deep fried fish on a school night

Shiro remembered the way Keith’s nostrils flared when he got off of his beat up red motorcycle with the ice box in hand.

“Do you smell that?” Keith asked.

“No?” Shiro replied.

The next night a big, black wolf started holding vigil outside Shiro’s property line. Every night when he got home from school, he noticed the wolf was getting closer and closer to the house. By the next weekend, the wolf was practically rolling around on his front porch most evenings, so Shiro invited the wolf in.

The wolf was a polite house guest. He never jumped on furniture and waited for Shiro to reheat fish in the microwave for him. He snapped up his dinner in seconds and then went to sit by the couch.

The wolf was huge. His head came up to Shiro’s shoulders and his paws were the size of dinner plates. He looked wild but he was so clean the sheen of his black coat was almost blue in the light of Shiro’s reading lamp.

Shiro might have been losing his mind because of the lack of adult company, but he didn’t hate the fact that the wolf loyally sprawled across his feet when he graded essays and other assignments on the couch. After letting the wolf out through the front door one night, Shiro went to bed, which was when all the trouble started.

He wasn’t always a light sleeper, but he had been trained to become one. He dreamed of bright flashes of light and loud noises and when he woke to the sound of growling and shouting, he thought he was still dreaming.

Shiro got out of bed slowly. He left his arm by his bedside, and walked to the window to look out from the between his curtains.

From the unfamiliar darkness, emerged a familiar shape. The black wolf whose presence Shiro had grown so accustomed to was rooting through his trash bins.

Shiro had been stationed in Pendleton for a while, and sometimes the braver, more clever coyotes would sneak down over the sandy hills and creep into the trash bins behind the Dunkin Donuts, but this was no coyote. The wolf growled again, so Shiro opened his window a crack to try and hear better what exactly was going on.

A second shape emerged.

It was Lotor. His white hair was matted and tangled but still luminous in the bright moonlight.

“What was that for you dirty dog!” Lotor spat as he struggled to stand. At first he tried pushing the wolf’s head out of the way and when that didn’t work, he simply vanished and reappeared up a tree at the edge of Shiro’s property.

Shiro couldn’t see what happened next through the curtains but one minute there was a wolf bounding towards the tree and the next it was Keith running and snarling.

“Stay away from him,” Keith said, “He’s not part of this.”

Lotor was suddenly right in front of Keith, having somehow transported himself hundreds of feet in a blink of an eye. Teleportation? Shiro thought, but then he realized Lotor wasn’t blinking in and out of existence so much as moving so fast that the human eye couldn’t keep up.

One second, Lotor was choking Keith with a hand around his throat, and in the next, Keith was gone and a black wolf was in his place, teeth barred and snapping at Lotor. It was like a stop motion movie, or freeze frames in an action sequence.

The two figures at the edge of Shiro’s property were moving so fast through slices of shadow and light that their battle took on a dreamy quality that placed it outside of time. The sounds of impact sounded like thunder, like falling rocks, or the way an engine coughed when it was backed up. No one was going to come out and check what was going on, so Shiro shook his head, and went to go get dressed.

**0.**

About three things Shiro was absolutely positive. First, Lotor was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him- and Shiro didn’t know how potent that part might be- that thirsted for blood. And third, Shiro was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with Keith, his friendly neighborhood werewolf.

**4.**

“Say it,” Lotor said, “Say it out loud.”

“Vampire.”

Shiro tried to sound some kind of way about it, but he probably sounded as cranky as he felt. He was standing outside in the middle of the night in jeans and his thickest coat and he was still freezing. Keith was wearing nothing and looked fine. There wasn’t even shrinkage.

Lotor frowned. “Aren’t you going to ask me the biggest question?”

“You’re a mysterious man of leisure who single handedly powers the local blood bank through charisma alone,” Shiro said. He was proud his teeth weren’t chattering. “I think I know the answer to the big question in question. What were you doing on my property?”

Lotor scowled and pointed at Keith. “Why aren’t you asking him that?”

“So you’re a werewolf?” Shiro asked.

“Yeah,” Keith said, “Last time I checked.”

“Fill in the blank for me,” Shiro said, “You were on my property because…”

“I was trying to keep you safe from the blood sucker.”

“Lotor,” Shiro said. “Would you like to take your turn at filling in the blank?”

“I just wanted to smell your fresh blood,” Lotor said after a lengthy pause.

Shiro recognized the expression on his face. He saw it on some of his rowdier students who thought they were getting away with something by admitting an outrageous truth that was supposedly too wild to be believed and not in any way a confession, thus freeing them of all possible reproach and consequences.

“And you did this because…”

“You smell,” Lotor said, and he took a deep breath as if to emphasize his point, “absolutely divine.”

“Great,” Shiro said. He was starting to feel like his hand would forever be melded his armpit. It was time to wrap things up. “I’ll come by the blood bank and donate every month if you’ll stop standing outside my house sniffing my essence. If there’s a dearth of A positive, then I expect you to act responsibly and keep it on the shelf. Lotor, see you at the next blood drive. Keith, come inside and grab some clothes before you leave.”

**5.**

Keith was as polite a house guest as a human as when he was a wolf.

Shiro told him to pick anything he wanted from the clean pile of laundry on the floor next to his half assembled dresser and went to take a hot shower. By the time he got back, the dresser had been fully assembled although the clothes were still on the ground and Keith was sitting on the bed in only a pair of basketball shorts.

I had a dream that started like this once, Shiro thought.

“I’m sorry,” Keith said. “I should’ve told you what was going on from the start.”

“Apology accepted.”

“Thace says you should come over to meet the pack some day.”

Shiro blinked. “There are more of you.”

Keith grinned. It was small, but it lit up his whole face.

There were moments when Shiro felt like he had known Keith his whole life. He remembered a time before meeting Keith and knowing his laugh and running through the woods at his side, Keith’s steadying hand at his elbow when he tripped on some unseen root that Keith always knew was there, and it was real but it was not. It was like being light sleeper. He remembered that a time Before existed, but the sensation of After was all he felt and was soon becoming all he knew. It was the packages of food that Keith brought over every few days, that Shiro was starting realize someone else had probably made, and the way Keith was absolutely fearless on his bike and how that feeling transferred to Shiro when he was holding onto Keith racing down the curves of a mountain road experiencing every aspect of the ride, the wind, the leaves, in technicolor and nearly painful high definition.

He felt most alive when he was Keith.

“Do you want to stay the night?” Shiro asked.

“Sure. I’d stay forever if you asked.”

“Please.”


End file.
